Of course, there is a sampling bias there for variants that result in hospitalizations.
Variant-specific proportions can be found here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/?ACSTrackingID=USCD...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#monitoring-varaint...
For nations like the US, we are measuring the variant by looking at sewage. It doesn't tell us anything about who ends up hospitalized, but it does give us a good indication of what the is the common variant in a community (and inferences are drawn from there).
The UK has been doing probably the most covid genome sequencing of any nation.
How about the cost of sequencing one drop of the vaccine vial they received, as a quality control sample of the distribution supply chain?
Sure. It'll run under $50 in bulk. Less, but not that much less, if you're only interested in sequencing the spike.
> How about the cost of sequencing one drop of the vaccine vial they received, as a quality control sample of the distribution supply chain?
This isn't a useful quality check. A negative result implicates your field assay rather than manufacturing.
> This isn't a useful quality check. A negative result implicates your field assay rather than manufacturing.
What if there were multiple samples of the same lot number, collected in different geographical regions at different times?
How do hospitals identify individual patients infected by Alpha, Delta or other variant?
Do they perform genetic sequencing of a virus sample from each patient, to determine what mutations are present? If they are doing statistical sampling, what percentage of patients are being sampled for variant identification?
It would helpful to have variant-specific numbers of cases and deaths added to national data, so that accurate graphs can be drawn for each variant. More granular data would support data analytics of local, variant-specific, policy interventions, to evaluate cause-effect on local health metrics.